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Show 49 Following Nature's ways required, first of all, that he give up all artificial paths. So it is not surprising to discover Muir announcing at the very beginning that he would disdain modern methods of travel. In 1872 he described the journey he had made four years earlier, when he first came to Yosemite. He contrasted his own method of travel to that of the typical tourist whose journey by stage and steam resulted in "memories made up of a motley jam of cascades and deserts and mountain domes." The big gun of a railroad "belched" tourists against the "targets of the golden State." What was the point, he wondered, when time, space, and travellers were annihilated by the process? The newest ways were not the best ways, and so Muir and a companion walked across California, by any road they chanced to find. Because they had plenty of time, they proposed to drift leisurely mountainward. In that way they could make the most of their time and place. Muir portrayed himself as a botanist, who drifted until lost in a kind of heaven on earth filled with "plant clouds" and carpeted with a "firmament of flowers." There in the Central Valley was a lake of "solar gold," whose source was the Sierra. The botanist stopped at one point, dipped into this lake, and came up with a strict accounting of California's wealth per square yard. The yield was staggering, 165,912 open flowers, a million mosses, all sorted into nine or ten natural orders, sixteen species. Such was the wealth of Nature in California, and Muir could, on occasion, tally it as well |
